


Sea Bound Hearts

by kaffyr (kaffyrutsky), kaffyrutsky, rutsky (kaffyrutsky)



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-20
Updated: 2010-08-09
Packaged: 2017-10-11 00:32:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/106270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaffyrutsky/pseuds/kaffyr, https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaffyrutsky/pseuds/kaffyrutsky, https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaffyrutsky/pseuds/rutsky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Singers in this hard but beautiful land often told Helen they knew as many songs as there were stars in the sky. Tonight, with the aid of two impossible strangers, she would help one singer reclaim those stars.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Mud and Mystery

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for Round 2 of the Nine/Rose ficathon at the Livejournal community **Storm_and_Wolf**. Many thanks to my editor, **dr_whuh**. He is the man. Thanks, my darling.
> 
> I had two prompts: (1) "Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy."(Beethoven) and (2) A picture showing a lighthouse, standing on a granite rock shore.
> 
> One very quick comment (longer, pseudo-academic notes will follow at the end of the story): Dr. Helen Creighton was a friend of my grandmother's. She visited and stayed with us many times as I grew up, and I knew immediately, when I took the prompts, that I wanted to introduce this amazing woman to the Doctor and Rose. As always, Doctor Who and its characters are owned by the BBC and their various creators. I earn nothing, and intend no infringements. I simply love them all.

Spring rains had left the road a hopeless topography of mud, loose shale, and rocks lying in wait for hapless vehicles. Helen looked at the right front flat, or where the flat had been before the wheel sank in the slurry now engulfing her ankles, and sighed

The jack and tire iron sat on the floor of the car, just as muddy as the road, and even more useless. As well-trained as she was in patching an inner tube, training counted for nothing without solid ground on which to place the equipment. Nor would it have done her any good even had she been able to fix the tube, not once she'd realized the axle was broken as well. She wasn't getting back to Dartmouth tonight.

She eyed the car with the kind of polite venom she'd once reserved for the professors in Toronto, but couldn't find it in herself to start swearing again. She'd long since exhausted her supply of military curses, and was too cold and wet to start that obscene cycle a third time.

"And of course, it's almost dark," she said to no one, fiercely regretting now the extra two hours she'd spent in the village. "And of course it's Sunday. No one from Halifax is going to come out this way in bad weather, and everyone in Petpeswick will be home for the night behind closed doors like proper Christians."

And where did that leave her and her precious equipment? Helen thought for a moment. Her people were out of town for the week, which meant that there was no one home to worry when she didn't return by nightfall. Tomorrow was Monday, and she was reasonably sure to be spotted by some one heading from the eastern shore into the city. But that was tomorrow. And the night was coming.

Petpeswick was nine miles behind her, Halifax 12 miles ahead; both were as out of reach as the stars, which would have been spectacular in the pending dark of tonight's new moon had they not been obscured by clouds.

She pulled herself back up into the cab of the car, despite the mud sucking at her shoes as if it resented her escape. Once inside, she moved her maps to one side, then twisted around to the back seat, where her cylinders and recording machine were stacked neatly beneath a blanket. She dragged the blanket to the front seat and pulled it around her. Lord, she wished Nova Scotia nights didn't stay cold so far into the year.

Half an hour later twilight and dusk had come and gone, with no miraculously timely passer-by to rescue her. So here she was, alone, in the dark of a country night. Her heart beat fast. Well, she did have the electric torch, but she hadn't changed the batteries in quite some time. Damn, damn, _damn! _And she wasn't going to run the car lights. She told herself she didn't want to drain that battery either, and tried not to think about what might step into the beams if she did.

She remembered Mexico, not so many years ago. She'd happily spent nights as dark as this one out in the desert, looking up for hours at the sharp beauty of the firmament and glorying in it as she fell asleep. But that was before her work here; before stories in fishing villages of ghost lights, of white forms mourning near rivers, of red-eyed dogs coming out of the black woods and pacing beside travelers until repelled by running water –

When she heard the sound, she almost stopped breathing in a rush of adrenaline and fear. It was unearthly, a rasp and a howl that faded in and out, getting louder and louder.

The scrubby pasture next to the road had been raggedly bordered with alders and young spruce. Now it was a jagged puzzle of darkness on darkness, but between and beyond the shadows which the trees had become, she could see something flashing.

Later she would remember, and wince at how childishly she'd clutched at her blanket and thrown it over her head, but the reaction came without a moment's conscious thought. Under that perceived safety, she listened to her own racketing heart and willed it to silence, certain that whatever had sounded that howl could hear everything she did.

Helen had no idea how much later – only minutes, perhaps, or seconds – she heard the metallic scrape along the sedan's front bumper. It was definite, that sound, and purposeful. Something had touched the car, and kept on touching it, dragging some part of itself up the bumper from the front headlight toward the door.

In the same instant that she processed the sound, something enveloped her with a darkness so far beyond the absence of light, so fearfully empty and hungry for life, that the night around her which had been so frightening only a moment before now seemed welcoming.

There's a sticking point in fear, Helen thought to herself with absurd clarity, where one either feel's one's heart stop and then nothing more, or one pushes beyond that to feel ice, and cold, and calm.

Very slowly, she pushed the blanket aside. Slowly, too, she moved to the far side of the car and away from the scratching sound, turning her eyes to where she remembered the door handle was. Her searching hand found and grabbed it like a lifeline.

She burst from the car in a graceless scramble, certain of only one thing; she had to escape from whatever was scratching at her car and sucking the light and joy from the very air around her. Her mud-caked shoes had some purchase on the unseen road now that night had frozen its muck, so she stumbled past the rear of the car with relative ease, and started to run back down the road toward Petpeswick.

Helen hadn't grabbed the torch in her dash, so she didn't see the large rock that caught her ankle and sent her sprawling into the ditch. She windmilled her arms in a useless attempt to regain some balance, but succeeded only in throwing herself into a splay-limbed pirouette down the slope.

Her already-barked ankle collapsed from the combined insult of gravity and a 45 degree angle, and she landed on her back, unable to prevent her head from snapping back to smash into yet another rocky outcropping.

The pain flared hot and red, then bled white, and Helen gazed blindly into the sky, seeing stars where none should be. As they cleared, something floated into her field of vision.

Helen whimpered, an animal sound of pain and terror.

The thing gazed down at her with what might have been eyes. What might have been its mouth moved, and Helen clapped both hands to her ears to shut out the sound, or what might have been sound, of its voice, of the great black and hopeless universe abandoning her.

It reached out to her, and she retreated the only way she could, into unconsciousness.

Before either could claim her, Helen saw something else. An arm stretched out above her, blocking the thing's further approach. She thought she saw a man in a leather jacket lean over her, eyes worried; she thought she saw an equally worried-looking young woman with long blonde hair kneel beside her, and thought she felt the girl's soft warm hands clasp hers. She thought she heard an echo of music. Then her mind refused any more thoughts.

  
****************

  
"– tellin' you it didn't mean to hurt her."

"You heard her scream. It was scarin' her to death."

"Scaring's one thing. Hurtin's another, especially deliberately hurting. It was just looking for help. You know that."

Silence for a moment, and then the other voice, a girl's – south London, Helen automatically catalogued the accent – resumed. "You're right. I know." She sounded reluctant. "Think it's just the way it looks. Bit like a ghost, yeah? It almost gave me a fit when we first saw it."

"All echtoid species look like that when they're emotionally unstable, Rose. That's the thing. Poor creature's so lost and frightened it can't keep its shape, and its fear was broadcasting so loud that even non-empaths could be affec – ah, here we go. Our second visitor's awake."

Helen wasn't certain how the man knew she'd regained consciousness. She had barely realized it herself, swimming up from the warmth of unknowing into what was apparently the middle of a conversation. For a moment, she thought she heard someone singing, and she wondered if that was what had awakened her.

"So, who do we have here?"

She opened one eye warily, to find two people standing over her, in the bright light of what appeared to be some sort of surgery, if the slightly medicinal smell was any guide. She waited for the pain in her head or her ankle to reassert itself. When neither throbbed, she decided it was safe to move, and gingerly raised herself up on her elbows to look around. Her eyes went wide. This didn't look like any hospital with which she was familiar.

"I'm the Doctor, and this is Rose Tyler," the man standing next to her said, not quite patiently. He obviously wanted an answer to his first question.

He didn't look like a doctor, she thought. And he certainly didn't sound like one with that rough Mancunian accent. He sounded a lot more like he was better suited to brawling through Gottingen Street on shore leave. Definitely docks, not Doctor.

"I'm Helen," she said. "Helen Creighton. Where am I?"

"You're in the Tardis," the girl said, the capital "T" evident in her voice.

In the light, Helen could see the girl, Rose, was much younger than the man. A daughter, perhaps? She noted the dyed hair with its dark roots, the tight clothing (trousers of some rough denim, cut in some style she'd never seen before) and amended the thought. A hired girl? No, surely a ... a woman for hire would look more like a tart and less like a ragamuffin – she stopped and chastised herself for thinking that way about someone who was looking at her now with the kind and open face of a child.

Helen resolutely put all her confusion, and her impolitic attempts at categorizing, to one side. There were far more important questions to ask. She sat up and swung her legs over the side of the narrow medical bed on which she found herself. A quick inventory showed that she wasn't in hospital garb; she checked her blouse and saw that it was still buttoned, then smoothed her skirt down and risked a quick look at her feet. As she thought, the mud-caked brogans were gone, but her stockings were still on, although much the worse for wear. She was surprised not to see any bruising about her ankle, though. "What's the Tardis? Where are my shoes? Why doesn't my ankle hurt? Or my head? What happened to my car and my equipment? Did you see that ... that ... " she trailed off, and some of the fear reasserted itself.

You don't have to worry about the ... person you saw," Rose hurried to say. "You're safe. I mean, you never were in danger, but you definitely don't have to worry about him. Her. It."

Helen barely had time to register the odd way Rose referred to her attacker before the man, the Doctor, interrupted.

"Wait. Helen _Creighton?"_ His eager tone caught her by surprise and she nodded.

"That's fantastic!"

The grin lit up his face, made him look genially mad.

"Why's that, then?" Rose turned to look at the Doctor.

"Well, it certainly fixes the time. It's Nova Scotia, and this is Helen Creighton, and she's not more than 40, so it has to be, what, 1934? Or maybe 1935?"

Confusion, curiosity and irritation warred briefly before Helen managed to make her next question quite mild. "You know me well enough to make rather impolite comments about my age, but you don't know what year it is? I'm sorry, but you really are going to have to tell me what's going on." After a moment she added, not quite certain why, except that she'd be damned if someone was going to think of her as 40, "It's 1933. April 29th, if it's still the same day I left Petpeswick. And I'm 33 years old."

"Right, sorry. I'm not good with ages," the Doctor replied, not sounding sorry at all. "But if it's 1933 ... are we on the eastern shore?"

"Aren't we in Halifax?"

"Nope."

"Well, then, yes, we're on the shore. We're just up the road from Petpeswick. If you happen to know where that is," Helen couldn't resist saying in her best schoolmarm voice.

"Oh, I do! You're recording old songs with a brand-new recording device – or are you still recording on wax cylinders?"

"Doctor..." Rose scowled at him, then turned to Helen with her own slightly manic smile. "I'm sorry. He gets so excited when he meets someone he admires."

"This is beyond foolishness," she responded slowly. "Where do you know me from?"

"Well, we've never met," Rose said. "But– "

"How much are you willing to believe?" was the Doctor's rather left-handed response. "And would you like a cup of tea?"

"As much as necessary, and I do believe I would like one very much. And perhaps a drop of sherry if you have any."

  
********************

Not father and daughter, nor procurer and cocotte, Helen thought, sipping her tea in the library of the TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimensions in Space, eh? She wouldn't soon forget that phrase.) Friends, though. And perhaps more than friends; a May-December marriage? No, no ... more teacher and student with feelings towards each other. She couldn't really imagine the Doctor and marriage. After all, he didn't seem to have any last name to give young Rose. Or any first name, for that matter.

Then she shook her head, exasperated with herself. Really, that topped everything. Sitting in a completely impossible room, in a completely impossible place, after a completely inexplicable brush with something equally and horribly inexplicable – at least until her completely impossible hosts chose to explain it – and what was she focusing on? Was she really that common in the face of the fantastic? She laughed softly at herself. Still, she did wish they'd give her shoes back. The fluffy slippers Rose had supplied as a substitute lacked in dignity.

"Couldn't find the sherry, but this Armagnac has a good nose to it," the Doctor interrupted her thoughts with an offering he'd procured from somewhere and brought in with him. "I heated the snifter. There y'go."

"I take it that the, uh, TARDIS has ample cellars?"

"It's got just about everything," Rose said, following the Doctor in with her own mug of tea in one hand, a plate of what looked like shortbreads in the other. "Except milk. We're always out of milk."

The Doctor rolled his eyes. It was obviously a long-standing joke between them. "Don't mind her. I don't."

"Oi!"

Rose put the shortbread plate down on an occasional table within Helen's reach; the two of them then settled comfortably next to each other on the sofa opposite Helen's barrel armchair. The Doctor made room for Rose, who pulled her legs up under herself, then started to go for a shortbread, before asking, "Would you like one, Miss Creighton?"

"No thank you. You've given me rather a lot to chew on as it is. And please, call me Helen."

"Helen, then." Rose smiled at her, and Helen warmed further to the girl's unaffected friendliness.

But she still had questions.

"You've given me a lot to think about, as I said, and I think you'll agree I've taken in everything you've told me, and been quite calm about it all," she said. "And I have you to thank for protecting me from whatever that horror was that attacked me – "

"Nothin' attacked you." The Doctor's tone was friendly, but brooked no opposition. "What you felt was a defense tactic by a scared and lonely sapient being, one that's not local. An alien being."

"Alien." Helen was sure her flat tone seemed impolite, but she wasn't immediately willing to believe that the blessedly brief fear she'd felt back on the road from Petpeswick could come from something that wasn't evil.

"From another planet," the Doctor said, as if to clarify himself. "One where you'd be alien. And if you landed there, you might well frighten the natives as badly as you were frightened by one of them." He leaned over and picked up his mug of tea, sipped at it appreciatively. Rose said nothing; she seemed to take everything he said as casually as if he'd just mentioned the weather outside.

Helen licked her lips, trying to decide what question to ask next. All her education, all her adventures in the ambulance service and in Mexico, which she'd always thought of as very broadening experiences, were less than useless in helping her now. But her father had always told her that the use of practical logic surmounted all problems and puzzles, if properly employed. So what would he ask?

"Why was this thing frightened?"

There was the man's outsized grin again. She felt as if she'd pleased an instructor, then as if she should be vaguely insulted at being reduced to student status.

"It's an echtoid – that is, it's an intelligent being of the type usually classified by those who like classifyin' these things as echtoid. Most echtoid species come from heavy planets, which is why they adore visiting relatively light-gravity places like Earth. It's a bit like swimming to them; they literally float in atmospheres like yours, and it's one giant playground as far as they're concerned."

All Helen could think to do in the face of that was nod politely while she took as large a swig of the Armagnac as she thought she could without coughing.

To her surprise, Rose took up the explanation at this point. "Some echtoid governments subscribe to agreements, interplanetary ones, about not interferin' with planets like ours. Insufficiently advanced civilizations, yeah?" She looked to the Doctor, who nodded approvingly. Definitely student and professor, then.

"Anyhow, even if they don't, they're usually very good about coverin' their tracks when they play tourist, which they do a lot, I guess, because ... I guess they're just naturally playful and like exploring and such. Anyhow, the Doctor says they've been comin' here for hundreds of years, and all they leave are ghost stories. 'Cos of the floatin' and the shape changing. They can change shape." She blew out a breath and pursed her full lips, looking for just a moment as nonplussed as Helen felt. "Shape changers and floaters. 'M never gonna get used to them."

"Sure you are," her crop-haired companion said indulgently. "You've gotten used to lots stranger. Thing is, though," and his face lost its good humor, "it's hard to communicate with echtoid species at the best of times.

"They're intelligent, no doubt about that; they've conquered interplanetary and interstellar travel in their own way, and all their systems are at peace. Like Rose said, some echtoid systems were even willing to agree to the Shadow Proclamation protocols. Civilized and intelligent. But– "

"A 'but'. Dear me," Helen said, raising an eyebrow.

"Not all of them subscribed to the agreements. Not because they planned anything malign, just because they didn't seem to understand the idea. Echtoids don't communicate easily with beings from mid-sized and non-gas giant planets," the Doctor said. "Don't much communicate like us at all. It's generally all silent with that lot."

"Oh, like scientifiction," Helen said, without thinking. "I've read a few issues of Amazing Stories myself. I'm familiar with telepathy."

"Well, it's not like they communicate thoughts, exactly. Or emotions, exactly. It's hard to explain," he said, and now he seemed apologetic. "They do have aural tones, but since they only use 'em when their shapes include mouths, it's usually under circumstances that aren't fully understood by non-shape changers. And each planetary system of echtoids uses them slightly differently. It's a right mess if you're not careful, or if you don't know what group you're dealin' with. Which we don't."

He jumped to his feet. Helen suspected he didn't much stay put in any one place for long. "And that's the problem. When they get upset, or frightened, it becomes almost completely impossible for life forms like humans to connect with them. And they broadcast all the fear or anger they're feelin' – it's a defense mechanism left over from an earlier point in their evolution – which makes it even worse."

Ah. Helen nodded slowly. "So this ... this – "

"Echtoid."

"Yes, thank you, Rose, this echtoid came to our Earth to ... hmm ... to play, and somehow was cast away, lost without a way back whence it came?" The thought was unexpectedly sad. "And I suppose it was so forlorn and afraid that when it encountered me, it suffused me with terror when – oh, my. It could simply have been trying to ask for help? To ask the way home?"

The Doctor nodded from behind the sofa. "Yup. The TARDIS got a scrambled call for help, so unintelligible that all we could go on was the color– "

"Color?"

"Mauve." He didn't offer any more explanation than that, and Helen didn't ask. "That, and a fairly accurate species flag and location echo. Lucky for us. And it.

"We got here, landed in a field close to the road – "

"The field – wait, was it the TARDIS that made that unearthly howl? I thought it was the creat– I mean, the echtoid."

"Howl?" The man actually looked injured. "The old girl makes a little noise when she materializes. Wouldn't call it a howl. Exactly.

"Anyhow, we materialized, and we soon found it, and you. Not the best of meetins' , obviously." He rested his hands on Rose's shoulders and she reached up to grasp one of them, an action so unthinking that Helen fleetingly thought she couldn't imagine Rose or the Doctor without each other.

What she felt, though, what stood foremost in her thoughts, was shame.

She knew it was irrational; from what these two were telling her, the strange being that approached her on the road might have provoked the same reaction from anyone, perhaps even them.

But now she knew it as more than a sound, or a frighteningly amorphous shape. It was a traveler, far from its home, and hopelessly searching for a way back ....

She had heard so many songs of loss and sorrow, sung by old sailors and fishermen in tiny cottages by the rocky coast, songs that told just that story.

Their eyes had sometimes filled with tears as they sang their plaints, those weatherbeaten men with careworn faces. They sang to remember the men who'd never made it back, they told her sometimes, in phrases both plain and poetic. They sang to remember the ones the storms took, the ones lost to warring with the elements, or to wars fought on the broad, broad oceans ....

"Helen?"

She looked up, to see Rose gazing at her quizzically, then shook her head slightly. "Sorry; miles away. I was just thinking. How small-minded I must sound to you. How parochial, to have that reaction."

"Don't," the Doctor said, surprisingly gentle. "Even I could feel the effect, and I knew what was goin' on. What that poor thing's been broadcasting ... well, there's a reason that echtoids leave ghost stories in their wake, even at the best of times."

She smiled faintly. "It's altogether possible, then, that many of the stories that my friends have told me didn't involve ghosts, but aliens. I wonder what Mr. Henneberry would say to that?

"But you still have a problem," she said, straightening up and turning as serious as the Doctor had earlier. "The creature's out there somewhere, and you need to find it, I suppose."

"Oh, no," Rose said. "We were able to get it into the TARDIS; the Doctor even managed to coax it into quarters of its own – "

"Shielded, which is why you and Rose aren't fightin' the flibbertigibbets right now," the Doctor interjected.  
"– but we can't talk to it. We can't find out who it is, or where it's from, or where its ship is. If we could find the ship, maybe we could fix it. An' if we knew where it's from, we could get it home, even if the ship was a total loss," Rose finished up.

Something went _click_ in Helen's head, a soundless implosion of – not understanding, not quite. It was more a feeling of what she could describe as nothing more than intense waiting; waiting to understand what she was to do next. It was the certain knowledge that she would know, soon, if she just kept a part of her mind quiet, in order to hear.

It didn't happen often, the little click in her head. She told few people about it. She was an academic, albeit a bit of an accidental one, and she could ill afford to give more fodder to some of the heavy-jowled stuffed-shirts at Dalhousie or the U of T who already thought she was out of her league with her self-developed folkloric practices.

But she told a friend once. Sometimes she got directives, she said; sometimes something would tell her to go one way, or do something. And she'd do it, and it would be the right thing to do.

Her heart beat just a little faster. "Could you take me to see it? To see the echtoid?"

"Why? Not runnin' a zoo here, y'know," the Doctor said, looking wary.

"I didn't think that for a minute," Helen said, her tone turning a bit sharp. "But I doubt I'll get much chance beyond your TARDIS to see a person from another planet. And – you may think I'm being rather forward to say it, but I have some communication skills of my own, as you apparently know. Perhaps it would be willing to let me know a little more, since it tried to, ah, reach me back on the road."

Rose and the Doctor both stared at her; he with a measuring gaze that made her glad she had not mentioned her inner signal, and Rose with wide eyes.

"You sure you want to do that?" the girl asked. "It's a bit weird, you know? Unsettling."

"I think I'll be fine, now that you've explained what it is. And as you said, Doctor, all I have to remember is that it might well be more frightened of me than I of it."

"Right, then. How d'you expect to get through to it?" The Doctor was taking her seriously, Helen saw. That was good, but a trifle unnerving. It also meant she had to do more than wait to get an unheard directive –

– there was that echo of song again ... "Is there a Victrola playing somewhere?" she asked her hosts, her train of thought derailed as she tried to pin down the source of the faint trill of minor notes.

She didn't think the Doctor could be surprised by anything she said, but his eyebrows shot up and he looked as bemused as his craggy face allowed. "No. You hear something?"

"Music. I hear music."

Rose put down the shortbread she'd been nibbling, and looked at Helen, her usually mobile face very still, and somehow older. For a moment, Helen thought she saw a flash of gold in the girl's huge brown eyes. "A song?"

Helen nodded. The two women looked at each other over the table, and she felt a sense of release, as if the wait was over. She knew at least one thing; she wasn't the only one who heard music in this strange place. And she would have an ally in Rose, when she announced her plan. Once she knew what it was, of course.

"Doctor, are we anywhere near where you found me?"

The Doctor eyed her, then Rose. For a moment, he said nothing, and Helen fancied she could see gears shifting just behind those remarkable blue eyes of his. Then he nodded. "Yup. In a field close by, like I said."

"Could you take me back to my automobile? And would you mind very much if I brought my recording equipment into your wonderful ship?"

_To be concluded_   



	2. Music and Magic

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here is the second and last chapter, in which Helen lets music build a bridge for the TARDIS' other guest. My editor is again **dr_whuh**. I couldn't do it without him. I genuflect in your direction, my darling. As always, Doctor Who and its characters are owned by the BBC and their various creators. I earn nothing, and intend no infringements. I simply love them all.

It surged back and forth across the space that held it, as if it were a wave searching for a shore. It was blush, and then blue, then a pearlescent cream that shaded to snow and darker to smoke and garnet before lightening to blush again. Sometimes she saw dark eyes and sometimes she saw slender fingers, but mostly she could see only that restless oceanic movement. How could she have thought this creature evil, or anything but beautiful?  
She certainly didn't think it was unintelligent, not after she saw the way those occasional eyes looked toward the three of them watching it from another room, or the way the intermittent fingers reached out in obvious supplication.  
"You're safe behind this glass, but you don't have one chance in a hundred of getting through to the echtoid unless you get closer physically," the Doctor warned. "If you do that, I can't guarantee the psychic broadcast won't be as uncomfortable for you as it was before." He was leaning against the wall, arms crossed and gaze focused on her. "It calmed down considerably once it was in there, partly because I think it realized this is advanced technology, with operators that might help it, and partly because the TARDIS is working hard to soothe it.  
"But She can't do everything," he said, somewhat opaquely.  
Helen smoothed her skirt unconsciously and suddenly wondered if she should just ask for help with the car, and get back to Dartmouth without making herself look any more foolish than perhaps she already did. Then she wondered, her mouth abruptly gone dry, whether she'd be allowed to leave; what if the Doctor decided she might let some snippet of information about him or the TARDIS out? Would that be against those shadowy protocols?  
Of course, he and Rose could simply have left her on the road, captured the echtoid, and have gone on their way, she reminded herself. That didn't sound as if they planned any foul play, or even slightly dirty pool.  
She didn't respond to his comments for a moment, busying herself with the equipment. It was clean and dry, for which she gave silent thanks. When she was satisfied, she plugged it into an outlet she was certain hadn't been in the wall when she and Rose had wheeled her equipment in 15 minutes earlier. Finally she addressed Rose and the Doctor.  
"The last thing I remember before I lost consciousness on the road was hearing music. When I awakened in your surgery, I heard more music. And as we spoke in the library, I heard it again.  
"I don't quite know how to explain it, but ... well, let me start over," she interrupted herself, annoyed that she couldn't bring her thoughts in line well enough to make her point. "This poor thing wants to talk to us, I believe. Do you, Doctor?"  
"Want to talk to it?"  
"No, do you believe it wants to?"  
He nodded.  
"And we want to do the same. All that we lack is a common tongue."  
"Go on, then."  
"I collect music. Stories, too, but mostly music; songs from the fisher folk and country people of Nova Scotia. In fact, before you ran across me, I was returning home from Petpeswick, where I'd spent the day recording tales and tunes. One of them is a song I've never heard before. It's sung by a very lovely woman, Mrs. Dennis Greenough.  
"Ann didn't know where the song came from, but it's the story of someone who has had to leave his home and go to sea. I believe it may have been written about a marine going off because he was drafted to fight in one of the American wars. The chorus asks "when I am far away on the briny ocean tossed, will you ever heave a sigh or a wish for me?"  
Rose had been standing very close to the window, one hand poised near the glass, as if she wanted to reach out to the echtoid. She turned to Helen. "Oh, that sounds so sad."  
"It is. It's very beautiful, but it is, I think, about someone who believes he will be lost on the sea." Helen found herself slipping into lecture mode. "It's a song of loneliness."  
"Oh, I think I get it!" Rose exclaimed with a brilliant grin. "Your song! Loneliness and being lost – that's the common thing between us and it, yeah?"  
Helen grinned back at her. She really was an intelligent little thing, wasn't she? "Yes, I think so."  
"So if we play the song to it, it'll maybe guess that we know the problem?"  
"What I'm also hoping is that it will try to communicate orally, once it hears this and realizes that we are presenting it deliberately – you did say they issue actual sounds from time to time, Doctor, did you not? If it does so in response to the song, we can listen to the sounds it makes, and try to determine a way to incorporate them into a message of our own."  
The Doctor hadn't said anything thus far, but that also meant he hadn't made any objections, Helen reasoned. She looked at him. "What do you think, Doctor?"  
"Let's hear this song," he said, an oddly brooding expression on his face. He looked – heavens, she thought, he actually looks apprehensive – as if he wasn't certain he wanted to hear it.  
"Alright," she said, hoping she hadn't committed some sort of _faux pas_ by taking the lead so enthusiastically. "You'll have to come in close. The sound is a bit tinny."  
It took a moment for the player to warm up, but the hiss of the cylinder soon resolved into Ann Greenough's sweet, plain voice. The sun was setting in the west, she sang, the birds were singing on every tree. All nature seemed inclined for rest ....  
"... but still there was no rest for me."  
Helen jerked in surprise at the whispered words, and looked at the Doctor. So did Rose. He paid no attention, but said no more, either. His blue eyes were shadowed as he dipped his head closer to the cylinder.  
The two women glanced at each other; Rose shook her head slightly, but she looked worried.  
Ann sang on, grieving to leave parents, comrades and a bonny loved one. The tune rose and fell in the room as she recounted brothers at rest, while she was left to be tossed on the deeps.  
The drums they do beat, Ann Greenough sang; the wars do alarm and a captain calls. So farewell, farewell to Nova Scotia's charms, for it's early in the morning, and I'm far, far away.  
The song ended, replaced with machine sibilance.  
And then with something else.  
Around them –  
– above them –  
– below them –  
" ... the voice ..." Helen gasped in recognition. She heard a soft exclamation from Rose, and something that might have been a low cry from the Doctor.  
It was Ann Greenough's song, but it was more. It was the sea, and the wind over it, and the women who mourned because of it; it was a dark night with no stars, and the remembrance of an ocean of them, and the yearning for more. It was the memory of family, and separation from them, it was the sound of tears and the song of birds and the rush of years. It was a song of ships, and of one ship, and from that ship.  
In the room beyond the glass, the waves stilled. Blush and blue, smoke and pearl, coalesced into a form, almost human and very lovely. It floated toward the glass, put out one graceful hand. Rose raised her own to the glass again. The echtoid reached ... and reached through the wall to touch her. Rose shivered, but held steady even as her eyes grew large and her hand trembled.  
Then it looked at Helen, and without a moment's thought, she took the two small steps needed to bring them in contact. Like Rose, she held up a hand.  
_*** broken wing * home lost * foolish * found now * calm rest * no fear * take me * thank you * home * thank you ***_  
That was how Helen pieced it together later, but words were only a facet, one petal of the blossom, one breath of the wind. They didn't encompass the name of the being who touched palms with her, with Rose. The name could be understood only briefly, and in passing, and wasn't a name as humans understood them.  
Nor could the words, at least as she tried to decipher them in years to come, give more than a hint of what star shone on the home the being so longed for. Spoken, they were as mapless as footprints made in fog.  
Ultimately, the reality of what she experienced with this being who was not from here could be imagined, but only as sketches in moving air. She had to be, and was, satisfied with what she carried away in her heart.  
She looked into the figure's eyes, and saw tides no human would ever experience in person, but she was not overwhelmed by their undertow. She understood that she had reached a strange and alien soul, and had given it comfort simply by letting it know it was not alone.  
And that was enough.  
But not for it, not yet.  
"The Doctor," she finally thought to say, still palm to palm with the echtoid. "He can help."  
_*** but mourns ***_  
"Doctor? Doctor?"  
She pulled away from those fathomless eyes in time to see Rose drop her hand and reach for the man on the floor.  
The Doctor sat on his heels, back straight, hands resting on his knees. Helen thought of pictures she had seen of Japanese warriors, still and composed.  
Tears, though, they had never been part of those pictures.  
"Shhhh ... it's OK ..."  
Rose dropped to her own knees beside him. The girl checked her movement toward him, as if she was afraid touching him would break him; the sound of her voice was still as enveloping as any embrace. "Listen to me, Doctor, would you, please? I heard it. I saw it ... no, listen. It ... it told me, I .... I ... Listen. Listen to me – it's not you. It's not the War. It's just a song."  
Helen wanted to look away, but Rose turned to her, then to the echtoid, a fierce protective glare warring with panic. "I don't know why this – he didn't touch the – he didn't touch it!"  
"Didn't have to."  
He sounded almost natural, but the terse brevity gave him away. He took a moment to scrub at his face with a motion that forbade comment on the tears, then stood up. Helen noticed that the first thing for which he reached was Rose's hand.  
"You apes, your empathic capabilities aren't strong. My senses were trained for full broadband psychic reception. I let it get too close to me when it was still agitated. My mistake, my fault," he said.  
"You couldn't have known it would come through the wall," Helen ventured, fighting the deep offense she felt at being called an ape. What on earth had he meant by that?  
"She's right, Doctor. How could you? It'd kept to itself before," Rose agreed. "I didn't even know it could come through solid stuff."  
The echtoid moved closer to the three of them, and Helen saw its newly-acquired lips move, with a sussurant voice: _"Forgive. No harm planned, makes sorrow to give sorrow."_  
It was speaking! Helen's excitement, her awe that the echtoid could pare its true communication down to bare and inadequate words, warred with the roiling confusion the Doctor's unexplainable grief caused her.  
"Nothin' to forgive," he told the thing. Then he wheeled and took Rose in his arms, hugged her, and this time Helen did drop her eyes. The looks on his and Rose's faces were not meant to be seen by other people.  
Only when he spoke again did she look up. The change she saw in demeanor was breathtaking.  
"Now," he said, stepping back and away from the young English girl with a completely unexpected grin lighting up his countenance. "I think I know how to get you home. Good listener, me. And the TARDIS helped."  
_ "Find wings. Weave renew?"_  
"Yup."  
_"Home?"_  
"For you." Then he glanced at Rose again, and said, "Always good to find your home."  
_"Relief. Thanks. Relief, relief, thanks for time servant, relief, thanks."_  
It dissolved with those words, into a wave and whirling column of pastel motion, its happiness so intense Helen felt her body ache with it. She laughed in shared delight, and didn't mind feeling the tears start to her eyes. Rose joined her in both laughter and tears.  
They composed themselves when they saw the Doctor step out of the room, then followed him down the hall to the arching cathedral dimness of the console room. The echtoid followed, its drifting progress providing them with a silently unending hymn of joy.  
*************  
"Well."  
Helen tried to follow that up with something intelligent, or at the very least polite. It proved impossible.  
Her mind was still – what was the phrase Rose had used? Her mind was blown ... somehow that odd saying seemed particularly appropriate. Seeing the echtoid's vehicle, and seeing how it actually merged with the thing once the Doctor had performed whatever technical magic was needed to turn the blackened metal into a gleaming ovoid again ... yes, her mind was blown.  
"It was beautiful, wasn't it?" Rose said, and Helen blessed her for taking up the conversational initiative.  
"Yes. Oh, yes, it was very, very beautiful," she agreed. "I hope it finds its way home."  
"It will," the Doctor said. His hands were in his pockets and he looking inordinately satisfied with himself. "It took a little time to understand the ship's AI, but once you get the hang of thinkin' a bit like an echtoid, you can podge about and fool the system into fixin' itself.  
"If I'm half as good as I think I am – and I'm brilliant – I've done better than that. Since the AI also gave me the last of the information I needed to figure out which species of echtoid this individual's a member of, I convinced the ship to carry it back to its home planet in half the time it normally would."  
"How long will that take?" Rose asked.  
"Not long at all. Under 100 years, I'm pretty sure."  
The two women gawped at him. He shrugged. "A lot of echtoid species are long lived. This one is very, very long lived. Almost as long as a Time Lord."  
Helen looked at him keenly, but didn't ask what the phrase meant. She'd listened to so many unusual words, or words used in unusual ways ... their language was one of the strongest proofs that these two people were not from her time. She wondered, though. Which war had hurt him so badly? Another question she would not ask.  
Unable, once again, to think of anything to say, she looked at the sky. She could see the stars tonight.  
They were standing in the road, beside her car. It, too, was fixed, although the only futuristic help she'd received was some sort of jack mechanism that lifted her car straight up and out of the muck and allowed the enthusiastic Doctor to get grease all over himself as he replaced the axle. He'd been rather smug about finding a replacement in one of the apparently endless nooks of the TARDIS.  
Helen stifled a very sharp pang of regret at not being able to explore the strange, half-alive creature in which Rose and the Doctor traveled, or being able to convince it to sing to her again.  
For it had been the ship which sang. And Helen was convinced that the music within the heart of the echtoid called to the music inside the TARDIS. She and Ann Greenough's song had merely provided a bridge.  
She had asked the Doctor if it might agree to do sing for her. He was almost curt when he said, "She does what She does, and I have very little say in it. Don't think She's goin' to sing again for a while."  
Changing his mind, or that of the ship – how amazing, that a ship should have its own mind! – was out of the question, unfortunately, if only because she didn't have time in which to try.  
It was still Sunday night, as far as Helen could tell, although it was edging into early Monday morning, which meant she had to get back to Dartmouth quickly. Her family might well be back at Evergreen, and it would be difficult as it was to convince them that she'd simply stayed too long into the night with the Greenoughs. It was a good thing her Petpeswick friends had no telephone.  
There was nothing for it, then.  
"I think I had best be getting home," she said. "I don't suppose I shall see the two of you ever again."  
The Doctor started to speak, then looked as if he had changed his mind about what to say. "You're probably right. But I've learned it's stupid to say 'never.'"  
"I know one thing," Rose said. "I'm so glad I met you. I'd like to come back here, sometime, when we're not rescuin' aliens. What I heard in the song – what the TARDIS sang, what the echtoid let me see – it's beautiful here, isn't it?"  
"My dear, it is the most beautiful place on Earth," Helen said in a rush of affection for the girl, before adding, embarrassed, "of course, that's my own very biased opinion."  
"You do your bit to get that across to the world, you know," the Doctor said. He smiled at her, and she was glad to see he didn't seem to hold a grudge against her for her song having upset him.  
"In fact, Helen Creighton, one of the reasons I know you is because you do somethin' I can't," he said, a friendly intensity in his eyes. "I rattle about from day to year to century, and history? Just flies by me. An' for reasons that really aren't all that interestin', I can't tell people about what I see when I'm travelin'. It's background noise for me, and less than that for the people I meet.  
"You, though ... you find history for people to experience. You find the _real_ history. The songs and the stories that come from all those human hearts out there. That's more than any hidebound would-be Gibbons can claim.  
"And that song – " For a moment, his throat worked as he swallowed back some emotion. "That's goin' to be one of the things people will remember _you_ for. It will be part of your story, about your heart, an' I can tell you the story will go on a lot longer than you might think.  
"You humans – "  
"We humans?"  
"You an' me, yeah," Rose said quickly. "I'm from London."  
Helen laughed out loud at the absurdity of everything she'd just heard, indeed, at everything she'd experienced in these past absurd and remarkable hours. She had wondered about the Doctor, but she hadn't been sure until now. So a strange alien time traveler knew her work, and had just told her that it was good, that it would outlast her. She shook her head, knowing it was completely mad, and knowing she would treasure it nonetheless.  
"Well Doctor, I shall remember the two of you for as long as I live. Thank you for everything."  
Rose grinned and shoved her hair back behind her ears. The Doctor nodded, one traveler in time to another. They turned and walked back to the TARDIS, hand in hand.  
Helen watched as it disappeared. Tonight, it sounded less like the howl of the unknown than the beat of a heart.  
When it was incontrovertibly gone, and the fields and roads as dark and silent as before her adventure began, she heaved a sigh, climbed back into the car, and headed home.  
It wasn't until she walked in the front door of Evergreen that she looked at her feet and burst into laughter that she couldn't really explain to her worried family.  
She was still wearing Rose's slippers.

_(end)_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Biographies about Helen Creighton can be found [here](http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/abcde/creighton_helen.html), [here](http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/women/002026-209-e.html) and [here](http://novascotia.com/en/home/aboutnovascotia/music/musictradition/songsstars.aspx), as well as [here](http://www.helencreighton.org/biography.html), and at Wikipedia. I've employed the writer's prerogative to incorporate her ambulance driving career and time in Mexico in the story. She lived most of her life, however, in the small Nova Scotian city of Dartmouth, which twins the province's capital Halifax and lies just across the Halifax basin. From the family home, "Evergreen" she set out to collect first songs, then stories. She was largely self-taught, and gladly benefited from the help of partners such as British music teacher Doreen Senior, who is credited along with Creighton with organization of much of her material.
> 
> Ann Greenough, from the Nova Scotian port village of Petpeswick, was the first singer from whom Creighton heard what is now known variously as "The Nova Scotia Song" or "Farewell to Nova Scotia." Creighton actually _did_ first hear it in 1933. She eventually collected two or three more versions from across the province, and synthesized them into the version which she published and eventually made famous. In good folkloric fashion, the words are still mutable in the mouths of modern singers. One of my personal favorites is [this](http://xrl.in/47xc), sung by a young Nova Scotian girl named Aselin Debison; despite her youth, and the fact that she only sings the first and last verses, her voice and presentation is the closest to what I imagine Helen first heard Ann Greenough sing. There are other versions, from [this complete version](http://xrl.in/47xp) of the song by another Nova Scotian singer, to metal-tinged punk rave-ups, and you can find many of them on YouTube.
> 
> Creighton also collected ghost stories and tales of the supernatural; her book "Bluenose Ghosts" contains stories that frightened the daylights out of me as a child – and still do. She was a staunch believer in the supernatural, and actually did say that she sometimes received directives to go one way or another. ('Bluenoser' is a traditional nickname for Nova Scotians.)
> 
> Finally, the woman I grew up calling "Aunt Helen" had a gorgeous smile, a hearty laugh, a natural dignity and a deep kindness. Wherever she is now – perhaps traveling the stars in a way very different than our favorite Doctor and companion – I send her my respect and love.  
> 


End file.
